back + forty, meaning “backside of a farm”. In the Homestead Acts (1860s), farmers were granted a quarter section; a section was 640 acres, a quarter section was 160 acres, and the quarter section was itself subdivided into four quarter-quarter sections of 40 acres each: two front forty and two back forty.
Well, I don't have 40 acres, more like 9600 sq ft. but I do need to walk my property to draw up my site plan. I know from the information provided by the Assessor's Office my lot is 75 ft wide by 127.96 ft deep and is rectangular in shape. So I can use those measurements to begin my site plan.
I started off taking measurements from the sidewalk and worked my way to the backyard. In total, I took more measurements than I care to count. My home has a lot of nooks and crannies, no doubt from add ons over its 110-year existence.
Here's a picture of my hand-drawn sketch, it's not pretty and not to scale but it will allow me to draw a scaled site plan using Google Drawings:
I notice I left off a number of measurements hence the X scrawled in a few places and will no doubt have to go back a couple more times to get measurements I need to add to my Google Drawings site plan layout.
So now on to the next step, using Google Drawings to make my site plan readable and to scale.
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